Poetics and Ruminationstag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-3810192017-12-10T15:19:55-05:00Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Poetry (and Everything Else), but Were Afraid to Ask.TypePadMiss Pussy's Bedrom Balladstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b7c93bdb02970b2017-12-10T15:19:55-05:002017-12-10T15:19:55-05:00Jude Roy Moore was never dirty.Turk

MISS PUSSY'S BEDROOM BALLADS

by Claudette McFang

MOORE OR LESS

Judge Roy Moore was never dirty,

He liked young girls for their purity,

So he hung out at the 'Bama mall

To find if he could do them all.

LOURING

NBC host Matthew Lauer

Invited maidens to his tower,

There to work on them his will —

Some of them may be there still.

FRANKEN

Our good Senator Al Franken

Says he’s sorry he was skankin’

Girls on tours with the USO —

Ship him out on a UFO!

CHARLIE ROSE

He arose,

Charlie Rose,

Then he flashed her,

Charlie Rose!

When it rose

He dropped his clothes...,

And there it was:

Charlie's rose!

DEEP FEELER

Garrison Keillor was a very deep feeler,

And quite a deep feeler was he,

He felt for his women, he felt for his girls,

He felt for them while they drank tea!

BATON

James Levine, James Levine,

Waved a baton that few have seen

At some young fellas when each was a teen —

And now they are calling the conductor their queen.

Two Balladestag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201bb09a8438c970d2017-06-23T07:24:18-04:002017-06-23T07:25:59-04:00Forgive us, love, for leaving you so soon.
Turk

The Lament of Turco the Terribletag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b8d1da2164970c2016-05-02T10:41:37-04:002016-05-02T10:41:37-04:00"I am the boy / That can enjoy / Invisibility." — from ULYSSES by James Joyce.Turk

Iron Pyrites in the Dickinson Minetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b7c82bf75c970b2016-03-30T13:08:50-04:002016-03-30T13:08:50-04:00"The 'New Poems of Emily Dickinson,' sad to say, are not new, not often poems, and not even quite Emily Dickinson's."Turk

R.I.P. EMILY DICKINSON

December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886

The Maid of Amherst, Emily

Dickinson, sang quietly

Far from the roar of the madding throng,

But now she holds her breath too long.

William H. Shurr of the University of Tennessee has been mining Dickinson's letters for nuggets overlooked by other Dickinson scholars, even Thomas H. Johnson whose The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, contains what the ordinary reader might have thought were all of Dickinson's poems, including those to be found originally in her letters. Evidently Shurr believes he hit paydirt in Dickinson's inexhaustible vein, for in September of 1993 he published his New Poemsof Emily Dickinson, in which he claimed to have discovered "Nearly 500 short epigrams and longer lyrics excavated from Dickinson's correspondence but not previously presented in poetic form. — 'Most of all, these poems continue Dickinson's remarkable experiments in extending the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility,'" as it was reported in the EDIS Bulletin.

Nearly simultaneously a review titled "Emily Warmed Over" by Gary Lee Stonum appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Professor Stonum wrote that these "New Poems [are] Anything but New." He continued, "The 'New Poems of Emily Dickinson,' sad to say, are not new, not often poems, and not even quite Emily Dickinson's. To produce this volume William Shurr has mined Dickinson's published letters, sometimes finding gems and sometimes fool's gold, but only rarely extracting anything Dickinson herself would have owned as one of her poems."

The book had a casual inception, according to Anita Manning, who wrote, "On a whim, Shurr set out some passages" from Dickinson's letters "as poems....” Evidently, according to information supplied on the title page of his book and elsewhere therein, Shurr's chief excavators were a graduate student, Anna Dunlap, and Shurr's daughter, Emily Grey Shurr, who did the exhumation under the editor's direction.

"The discovery is 'an exciting, innovative and important advance in Dickinson studies,' wrote Dickinson scholar Emory Elliott of the University of California, Riverside, on the book jacket. He called Shurr's work 'a major advance in our knowledge of Dickinson as poet and person.'"

"These poems use her [Dickinson's] preferred hymn or ballad meters and unusual rhymes," Shurr averred not only in his book and in the Bulletin, but in many of the media, including newspapers, television and radio. However, what struck this reader most strongly was the fact that "these poems" did not use rhymes — unusual or not — at all. Perhaps graduate students may be excused for being unaware of the various definitions of prosodics and verse forms, but one expects editors and scholars to know them.

Pertinent standard definitions (from my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, third edition) are as follows:

BALLAD: Universal in the Western world. Folk ballads are written in podic prosody, literary ballads in accentual-syllabics. The BALLAD STANZA is [rhymed] a4 b3 c4 b3. [The superscripts indicate line lengths.] For related forms see COMMON MEASURE (95-97).

Emily Dickinson did not write ballads, which are medium-length lyric narratives, nor did she write in the accentual folk ballad measure called "podic prosody"; thus, "ballad meters" is the wrong term — there is a clear difference between a "meter" and a "stanza." The correct term is common measure stanzas, which Dickinson found in the hymnals of Amherst and used as her models:

COMMON MEASURE: Accentual-syllabic. Rhymed. A QUATRAIN STANZA written in iambics.... The rhyme scheme is abcb. The first and third lines consist of four iambic feet; the second and fourth lines, of three iambic feet (119). HYMNAL STANZA is the same, except that it rhymes abab [ibid.].

Common measure and hymnal stanza must rhyme. Since the "poems" under discussion here do not rhyme, and only the most optimistic scansion would show that they were purposely written in iambic meters, they are not cast in Emily Dickinson's standard common measure and hymnal stanza patterns. Here is an example, "One of Shurr's favorites among the new poems," according to Manning:

A Letter always seemed to me

like Immortality,

for is it not the Mind alone,

without corporeal friend?

If "lines" one and two seem to set up a couplet rhyme pattern, then the reader's expectation is that lines three and four will do the same. Their complete failure to do so has the effect of anticlimax, undercutting not only the chime of the poem, but our expectation of what a Dickinson poem should accomplish. Taking these lines out of their context in this way, as though they were a finished quatrain, destroys the effect that they had in the letters and tends to trivialize the rest of Dickinson's verse oeuvre.

If it is true that Emily Dickinson never consciously wrote an unrhymed poem in her life, it follows that the passages in New Poemsof Emily Dickinson cannot possibly be said to be "new" poems by the Amherst poet under any of the circumstances its editor has discussed. Although she did sometimes use the same lines in both letters and poems, unless she used lines from the former in the latter, Dickinson clearly meant them as prose passages, and prose passages they remain, despite an editor's having "lineated" them according to phrasal patterns. People since the twentieth century have been calling line-phrased prose "free verse" (a contradiction in terms — “verse” is “metered language, “prose” is unmetered language; thus, “verse” cannot be “free”), but we know what Emily Dickinson thought of Whitman's prose poems.

These concerns of mine were embodied in a letter I wrote to Dr. Shurr on 8 August 1993, after he and I had attended the 1993 meeting in Amherst, Massachusetts, of the Emily Dickinson International Soci­ety. Dr. Shurr replied with a letter justifying his book. It was difficult to know where to begin to correct his errors, but I decided to start with this quotation from his response: "It is almost a cliché in Dickinson studies for nearly a century now to call this unit ['the two-line unit that alternates iambic tetrameter with iambic trimeter'] ballad meter, or hymn meter, or more usually fourteeners."

If it is cliché it is also erroneous and another proof of something I have long bemoaned: Most scholars and critics of American literature know nothing whatever about prosodics and are quite disdainful of those who do. No doubt it is the "intuitive" Emerson/Whitman influence; as Dana Gioia has pointed out in a recent essay:

"Today prosody is a neglected subject.

"Few literary critics know more than the rudiments of metrics, and, in the aftermath of the free-verse revolution, even many poets have never studied versification. The last century, however, considered prosody an essential part of literary education" (93). "Surely one reason for the drop in Longfellow's reputation has been the decline of interest among both scholars and poets in formal prosody."

That does not, however, excuse the ignorance, nor ought one to condone its continuance.

First, that "two-line unit" is not a "unit." Many of the "poems" Shurr has identified are two lines long, what he calls "fourteener epigrams." However, fourteeners are not used singly, and Dickinson never intended that they should be; fourteeners are always paired with another line — either another fourteener, or an Alexandrine line to form a couplet of Poulter's measure (see pp. 226-227 of The Book of Forms). There is a caesura after iambic foot four of each fourteener, and the line has long been broken at that point to form two lines (small x = an unstressed, unrhymed syllable; capital X = a stressed, unrhymed syllable; capital A, B, C — any syllable other than x = a stressed, line-ending syllable that may rhyme):

xX xX xX xX · xX xX xX, i.e.,

xX xX xX xX ·

xX xX xX

If this were all, Shurr might have a case for his "fourteener epigram," but another fourteener is required to complete the unit, which is a couplet unit:

xX xX xX xA

xX xX xB

xX xX xX xC

xX xX xB

This quatrain is called common measure, (not "ballad meter" unless it is written in podic prosody), and when Dickinson used it as a poem or stanza form, she rhymed it as tradition required.

Shurr cited poem "J. 497" from the Johnson collection to prove that Dickinson sometimes did not rhyme her poems:

He strained my faith —

Did he find it supple?

Shook my strong trust —

Did it then — yield?

Hurled my belief —

But — did he shatter — it?

Racked — with suspense —

Not a nerve failed!

Wrung me — with Anguish —

But I never doubted him —

'Tho' for what wrong

He did never say —

Stabbed — while I sued

His sweet forgiveness —

Jesus — it's your little "John"!

Dont you know — me?

It is true that, as Johnson has printed this poem, it does not rhyme. However, the poem first appeared as no. 608 in the section titled "Poems Incomplete or Unfinished" of Bolts of Melody. In that incarnation it was printed thus:

He strained my faith — did he find it supple?

Shook my strong trust — did it then yield?

Hurled my belief — but did he shatter it?

Racked with suspense, not a nerve failed!

Wrung me with Anguish — must be I deserved it,

Though for what wrong he did never say,

Stabbed — while I sued his sweet forgiveness.

Jesus — it's your little "John"! Why me slay?"

(304)

This version certainly rhymes or, to be accurate, the first stanza consonates (off-rhymes) and the second true-rhymes. It took me less than five minutes to find this version in my personal library. To be sure, it would take me a bit longer to discover why there are differences in the versions — for instance, in the second version, "must be I deserved it" instead of "But I never doubted him — " in the "Wrung me with Anguish" line, or "Why me slay?" instead of "Don't you know — me?" in the last line.

According to Mrs. Todd, editor of Dickinson's 1931 Letters, "In her early twenties Emily began to conclude her letters with a poem, but as part of the text, written as prose, as if half hoping that the correspondent might not detect its presence. — Later, poems, as such, were not only part of the text; sometimes a poem constituted the entire letter." (455) Morever, she would often use the same "poem" in more than one letter; a note in Bolts says, "In Mrs. Todd's copy the last two words [of the last line] are inverted." (304) Some scholars have argued, however, that none of Dickinson's "prose" pieces ought to be counted a "poem" unless it appears in one of the "fascicles," the little ribbon-bound manuscript chapbooks that were found among the poet's effects after her death, and I tend to agree with this view.

For these, and many other reasons, the "poems" of Emily Dickinson are extremely problematic. Staying with the example Shurr chose, for instance, one might point out that, as he has given it, the poem not only does not rhyme externally, it also does not exhibit iambic meters. Here is an accurate scansion of the first "quatrain" in Johnson's version:

xX xX

xxX xXx

Xx XX

xxXX

The only iambs are to be found in "line" one, which is iambic dimeter. Line two has no normative foot but consists of one anapest and an amphibrach. Line three has a trochee and a spondee. Line four is what a classical metrist would call a pyrrhic and a spondee, what Harvey Gross calls "a double iamb," and what J. R. R. Tolkien calls a "long rise" when he is discussing accentual (podic) prosody.

Nor is the "quatrain" written in podic prosody, for if it were written out as two lines of Anglo-Saxon prosody (which is the basis for podic prosody, TBoF, pp. 26-32), accentually it would look like this (the dot indicates the caesura in the center of the stich):

xX xX · xxX xXx

Xx Xx´ · xxXX

Stich two has five stresses, three in the first hemistich, where two would be required. In other words, this "stanza" is not written in verse, which is "metered language"; it is written in prose, "unmetered language." All that Johnson did was to break Dickinson's prose up into lines according to phrasing, what some have called "lineation" and what I call "line-phrasing." (I direct the reader's attention to the chapter titled "Whitman and I" in my book The Public Poet, where I go into this matter in some detail.)

Either one must maintain that Emily Dickinson sometimes wrote prose poems, or that this was not intended by Dickinson as a poem to begin with. If the Todd ("T. 608") version comes to light, one may suspect that Dickinson never arrived at a version of the poem that she thought of as complete, for it exists in a short-line (J. 497) and at least two long-line versions. Though the latter may show tendencies toward regular meter, the rhythms are quite rough and it is clear why the editors considered the poem to be unfinished.

Here is my numeration of the various feet in this "poem": iambs, 14 (counting the double iamb); trochees, 11; anapests, 2; spondees, 4; amphibrachs, 3. If iambs predominate, barely, over trochees, this piece is far from regular metrically, either as an iambic poem or as a podic poem (although it is actually more regular accentually than it is accentual-syllabically, for the number of stressed syllables ranges only between four and five accents).

These are the sorts of things I meant when I called Shurr's scansions "creative." That Johnson's were as creative does not speak well for his understanding of what it is that poets do. There is no excuse for scholars and critics of American literature to ignore the prosodic practice of the poets themselves, yet they seem to be willing to be ignorant and to excuse that ignorance by citing other scholars' ignorance. In my opinion the whole of Dickinson's "poetic" oeuvre needs to be gone over again prosodically to determine what she intended to preserve as verse poems and what she meant to leave as prose. Dickinson knew when she wanted her words to appear as finished verses, and she knew when she intended to leave them as parts of letters.

Works cited in “Iron Pyrites in the Dickinson Mine.”

Emory Elliott, book blurb on the jacket of Shurr, New Poems by Emily Dickinson, q.v.

Dana Gioia, "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism," in The Columbia History of American Poetry, Jay Parini, ed., New York, NY: Columbia U. P., 1993.

The Queen of Swordstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201bb0875b40f970d2015-09-21T11:00:56-04:002015-11-30T11:14:15-05:00From Laurie Knapp on FACEBOOK: "I really hate to have to ask this again, but I need prayers by the bucketful: the cancer I thought I had licked three years ago has metastasized into my bones."Turk

THE QUEEN OF SWORDS

An Allegory for my former student Laurie Knapp who asked me to write her a funny poem which I did before she died of cancer in Oswego, New York, on 29 November 2015. Farewell, Laurie.

The Subtle Thread of Alfred Nicoltag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201bb07e46f52970d2015-01-28T12:04:25-05:002015-01-28T12:13:48-05:00Four years in the making, the CD is a recording of nine original songs by John Tavano and Alfred Nicol, featuring the beautiful, vulnerable voice of Ann Harter.Turk

On Wednesday, January 28, 2015, Alfred Nicol wrote me,

Dear Lew,

You may remember all of my excited talk about the songs I was writing back in the spring of 2012 at the Newburyport Literary Festival. Well, I'm excited to announce the completion of a project that I've put all of my creative energy into over the past few years, ever since classical / flamenco guitarist John Tavano invited me to write lyrics for his songs. It's an eclectic mix: four of the songs are in French, five in English; the musical style ranges from Parisian café to smoky bar room torch-song. I've attached the title song for you to hear —

Four years in the making, the CD is a recording of nine original songs by John Tavano and Alfred Nicol, featuring the beautiful, vulnerable voice of Ann Harter. We've gathered some of the finest musicians around to create a sound

unlike anything you're likely to hear on the radio. Chris Plante, formerly of The Brew, plays melodica and keyboards; Alex Sandman is superb on bass; Aaron Zaroulis, who was drummer for The Brew, appears on several tracks. Albert Lamar, who was part of the Mississippi Symphony for fifteen years and who has performed in orchestras for Ray Charles and The Chieftains, plays flute and sax for us. And of course the master guitarist John Tavano, who composed these melodies, brings his own vision and musicianship to the recordings.

Global Pollutiontag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b8d0a7aa4f970c2014-12-12T11:09:48-05:002014-12-12T11:09:48-05:00This poem, about global pollution, was written in the 1950s, long before the term “global warming” was in common usage.Turk

This poem, about global pollution, was written in the 1950s, long before the term “global warming” was in common usage:

Form of the Week 11: Balladstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b7c6f9b310970b2014-10-24T10:40:49-04:002014-10-24T10:52:01-04:00"Podics uses rhyme, but it does not regularly alternate stressed and unstressed syllables. Podics is a holdover, in folk poetry, of Anglo-Saxon prosody."Turk

Geoffrey Chaucer

UNDER A LOT OF STRESS

Podics is a "folk meter," and it is often found in anonymously written nursery rhymes, ballads, and madsongs. Many English language poets such as John Skelton in the early Renaissance, the 19th-century Scots poet Robert Burns, and such twentieth-century poets as John Crowe Ransom, Vachel Lindsay, Ralph Hodgson and Theodore Roethke have used the accentual prosody called “podics” successfully. Podics uses rhyme, but it does not regularly alternate stressed and unstressed syllables. Podics is a holdover, in folk poetry, of Anglo-Saxon prosody.

After Geoffrey Chaucer, his contemporary John Gower, and other fourteenth-century poets combined the Norman French syllabic system with the native English strong stress prosody, thus inventing accentual-syllabic prosody, the common folk, including the balladeers of the Scottish-English border, continued to hear the ancient alliterative stich (line) and echoic devices, so they continued to write using the old prosody, but they added true rhyme and stanza forms, which they adopted from the Norman French after year 1066. Many a nursery rhyme and lullabye is nothing more than two rhyming stichs (a distich) of Anglo-Saxon prosody:

Notice the alliterations in some of the stichs, and the added rhymes (the rhyme scheme is aa, bb): these distichs look like ordinary couplets of accentual-syllabic prosody, and they even sound something like them, but add a breve (È) over each unstressed syllable, and no regular pattern of verse feet appears:

The cock's on the midden · blowing his horn;

The bull's in the barn · threshing the corn;

The maids in the meadow . are making of hay;

The ducks in the river . are swimming away.

If this were accentual-syllabic verse, we would be looking for a running foot(common rhythm) — that is, a regularly recurring pattern of a single kind of verse foot. The first foot in the first line is an iamb ; the second is an anapest ; the third is another iamb, and the fourth another anapest. In line two there is an iamb, an anapest, a trochee and an iamb. Line four shows an iamb and three anapests in a row — this is the only line in which a particular verse foot predominates, But what stays absolutely steady is the strong stressing: there are four strong stresses in each line; this poem, therefore, is written in podic meters.

Sometimes these stichs are line-phrased; that is, they are broken at the caesurae to become dipodic lines:

This is nothing more than rhyming song measure, q.v — a Norse edda measurequatrain whose first and third lines are stichs of Anglo-Saxon prosody, and whose second and fourth lines are tripodic...that is, they are quatrains rhyming abcb consisting of two couplets made of a full stich followed by a tripodic line. There are falling rhymes and falling endings, the only thing new added being the internal rhymes in the full stichs: the hemistichs rhyme. Secondary stresses do not figure in the system, only the strong stresses.

This podic quatrain stanza is called ballad stanza, and many ballads are written in it (but not all of them, for the definition of a ballad is simply, "a relatively short lyric narrative," and it may be written in any stanza form). Ballad stanza written in accentual-syllabic prosody rather than in podic prosody is called common measure or common meter, and it is the form of many hymns and other songs — lyrics.

Although there are no verse feet to be found in podic prosody, nevertheless J. R. R. Tolkien (see bibliography) isolated six basic hemistichs in Anglo-Saxon prosody, and these basic half-lines have been retained in many podic poems: 1) The double-fall (¢È¢È) as in “Mistress Mary | Quite contrary”; 2) the double-rise (È¢È¢) as in “With silver bells | and cockle shells;” 3) the rise-and-fall (È¢¢È) as in “the two gray kits”; 4) the rise-and-descend (¢¢.È) as in “My MaidMary”; 5) the fall-and-ascend (¢¢È.) as in “To woo the owl”; 6) the descend-and-rise (¢¢È¢) as in “Hark! Hark! the lark!

There are, however, many more rhythmic variations possible. Two others are quite common: 7) the short rocking foot (¢È¢) as in “See them jump | up and down! This is called the amphimacer (cretic) in accentual-syllabic verse, where it is in fact seldom found in English language poetry written in that prosody. There are also 8) the long rocking foot (¢ÈÈ¢) as in “Hippety-hop, | hippety-hop!”; 9) the long rise (ÈÈ¢¢) as in “And a one-two, and a three-four” — Harvey Gross in his book Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (see bibliography) calls this rhythm the double iamb and discovers it frequently in accentual-syllabic verse, where it substitutes for two iambic feet, and 10) the long fall (¢¢ÈÈ) as in “Come jump with me,” which in accentual-syllabic prosody would be the double trochee.

The BALLAD is a relatively short lyric verse tale meant to be sung. There are distinctions to be made between literary ballads and folk ballads; the latter were passed down through oral traditions from balladeer to balladeer (a wandering minstrel, gleeman, jongleur, minnesinger, bard, or scop, an old English court or household poet-harpist-singer). On the other hand, the troubadour (who composed in the langue d'oc in Provence, northern Italy and northern Spain) and trouvère (who composed in the langue d'oïl in northern France) were medieval French literary poets, composers of gestes and songs.

First, English language literary ballads are usually written in accentual-syllabic prosody; folk ballads are often done in some podic meter. Further, the literary ballad's author is usually known, whereas the folk-ballad's author is usually anonymous. Third, because the literary ballad is still whole, it follows a more or less normal narrative pattern, but as the folk ballad was passed down from hand to hand, it has often — but not always — become eroded, and only the high points, or crises and climaxes, remain. This phenomenon is called "leaping and lingering" — the folk ballad leaps from high point to high point, skipping connecting passages, and lingers on each a while before it leaps again. Here is a Scottish folk ballad that uses a number of sonic techniques, particularly repetition and incremental repetition — notice that every line is some sort of refrain. Notice, too, that the poem is not end-rhymed; it consonates:

LORD RANDAL

"Oh where have you been, Lord Randal, my son?

And where have you been, my handsome young man?"

"I've been at the greenwood; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

"And who met you there, Lord Randal, my son?

And who met you there, my handsome young man?"

"Oh, I met with my true-love; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

"And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my son?

And what did she give you, my handsome young man?"

"Eels fried in a pan; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

"And who got your leavings, Lord Randal, my son?

And who got your leavings, my handsome young man?"

"My hawks and my hounds; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

"What happened to them, Lord Randal, my son?

What happened to them, my handsome young man?"

"They swelled up and died; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

"I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randal, my son.

I fear you are poisoned, my handsome young man."

"Oh yes, I am poisoned; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

"O what will you leave me, Lord Randal, my son?

O what will you leave me, my handsome young man?"

"Twenty-four milk cows; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

"And what for your sister, Lord Randal, my son?

And what for your sister, my handsome young man?"

"My gold and my silver; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

"What's left for your brother, Lord Randal, my son?

What's left for your brother, my handsome young man?"

"My houses and lands; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

"What of your true-love, Lord Randal, my son?

What of your true-love, my handsome young man?"

"I leave her hellfire; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

Anonymous Scots Author (v. Wesli Court)

If one splits one fourteener couplet (see the Alexandrine line and poulter’s measure, (see The Book of Forms) and adds abcb rhyme, one will achieve a quatrain of common measure or ballad stanza, Here is a folk ballad written in ballad stanza:

THE UNQUIET GRAVE

“The wind doth blow today, my love,

And a few small drops of rain;

I never had but one true love —

In a cold grave she has lain.

“I’ll do as much for my true-love

As any young man may;

I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave

For a twelvemonth and a day.”

The twelvemonth and a day being spent,

The dead began to speak:

“Oh, who sits weeping on my grave

And will not let me sleep?”

“It is I, my love, sits on your grave,

And will not let you sleep;

For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,

And that is all I seek.”

“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips?

But my breath smells musty strong!

If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,

Your time will not be long.

“‘Tis down in yonder garden green,

Love, where we used to walk —

The finest flower ever seen

Is withered to a stalk.

“The stalk is withered sere, my love,

So will our hearts decay;

So make yourself content, my love,

Till you are called away.”

Anonymous Author (v. Wesli Court)

Although this poem does not have a refrain, many ballads do, like “Lord Randal.” This next poem originally appeared in my First Poems (1960); it was written while I was attending the University of Connecticut from 1956-59:

AN IMMIGRANT BALLAD

My father came from Sicily

(O sing a roundelay with me)

With cheeses in his pocket and

A crust of black bread in his hand.

He jumped ashore without a coat,

Without a friend or enemy,

Till Jesus nailed him by the throat.

My father came to Boston town

(O tongue a catch and toss one down).

By day he plied a cobbler's awl,

By night he loitered on the mall.

He swigged his wine, he struck his note,

He wound the town up good and brown,

Till Jesus caught him by the throat.

He'd heard of Hell, he knew of sin

(O pluck that wicked mandolin),

But they were for the gentle folk,

The cattle broken to the yoke.

He didn't need a Cross to tote:

His eyes were flame, his ears were tin,

Till Jesus nabbed him by the throat.

He met a Yankee girl one day

(O cry a merry roundelay)

Who wouldn't do as she was bid,

But only what the good folk did.

She showed him how the church bells peal

Upon the narrow straitaway,

And Jesus nipped him by the heel.

My father heard a sermon said

(O bite the bottle till it's dead).

He quit his job and went to school

And memorized the Golden Rule.

He drained his crock and sold his keg,

He swept the cobwebs from his head,

And Jesus hugged him by the leg.

The girl was pleased: she'd saved a soul

(O light a stogie with a coal).

No longer need she be so wary:

Daddy went to seminary

To find how warm a Yankee grows

When she achieves her fondest goal.

And Jesus bit him on the nose.

At last he had a frock to wear

(O hum a hymn and lip a prayer).

He hoisted Bible, sailed to search

For sheep to shear and for a church.

He asked the girl to share his life,

His choir-stall and shirt of hair,

For Jesus bade him take a wife.

My father holds a pulpit still

(O I have had enough to swill).

His eye is tame, his hair is gray,

He can't recall a roundelay.

But he can preach, and he can quote

A verse or scripture, as you will,

Since Jesus took him by the throat.

And, of course, "An Immigrant Ballad" called for another, a distaff ballad with a double alternating refrain that is extracted and printed as a coda:

REQUIEM FOR A NAME

Believe it or believe it not,

My mother was a Putnam once.

On her ancestral tree she swears

The Lowells and the Deweys too

Hang pendulous as lovely pears.

My grampaw was a sort of dunce

Who rather let things go to pot —

Himself, his offspring, farm and wife.

My grampaw was a sort of dunce.

His homestead I remember well:

The floors were warped, the doors askew,

And now and then the rafters fell.

My mother was a Putnam once —

She led a less than social life,

So she went East from grampaw's West.

My mother was a Putnam once

Till she was married, woe O! woe.

No longer was she maiden free —

She cursed her pa from pate to toe.

My grampaw was a sort of dunce

To cheat the eaglet in its nest

By willing her a woman's form.

My grampaw was a sort of dunce,

But what a hefty name he wore!

He gave my middle name to me;

It fits me like a saddlesore.

My mother was a Putnam once,

I'd be one too, come sun or storm.

The Deweys and the Lowell hosts

Are pendant from a hollow tree.

Now with this rime let them be felled,

Let me be nothing more to me

Than windfalls blasted by the frosts.

My mother was a Putnam once;

My grampaw was a sort of dunce.

Suggested Writing Exercise:

Write a ballad in ballad stanza or in a nonce form of your own invention, with or without a refrain.

Year by Yeartag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201b7c6dad986970b2014-09-06T17:04:15-04:002014-09-06T17:04:15-04:00Then we enter adolescence
To discover that the essence
Of existence seems hormonal:
We must learn to deal with excess
Of enticements pheremonal,Turk

An Immigrant Balladtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8345219e069e201348522956a970c2010-07-02T00:01:00-04:002015-02-18T11:19:10-05:00My father came from Sicily / O sing a roundelay with meTurk

1890-1968

This poem was written while I was attending the University of Connecticut from 1956-59, after I had graduated from Meriden High School in Connecticut in 1952 and subsequently spent a four-year enlistment in the U. S. Navy. I talk about it a little in the memoir / short story “Father and Son,” which may be found in several of my books (see the footnote below), but others have written about it as well, in particular Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale who reprinted it in La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience:

Mangione and Morreale wrote, “The humor here is strikingly reminiscent of Robert Canzoneri’s novel A Highly Ramified Tree (1976). Canzoneri’s father was also a Sicilian immigrant who married, in his case, not a Yankee but a southern woman, and he too became a minister in the Baptist Church.

“By 1990, after publishing his twelfth collection of poems, there is little or no evidence of the Italian experience in Turco other than the spelling of his surname. His recent collection of poetry, The Shifting Web (1990), is a far cry from the earlier poems about Italian Americans. One critic wrote of it: ‘Dominated by images of snow, shadow, dust and decay, Web ignores urban life and human traffic…Yet it is deeply philosophical.’”

Although I may not have written a great amount of poetry of late years specifically about “Italian Americans,” I have, indeed, written a lot of prose about my Italian heritage.

My cousin Ann Buttigheri sent me this today from New Jersey, Wednesday, February 18, 2015”

“Hi Lew,

“Yes I watched it, and while I knew there was prejudice, bias and inequity towards the Italians early on, I didn't realize the extent. But then I should have known. Quick story:

“My dad and his family came here @ 1904. My grandfather (Giuseppe) was a barber by trade, but there was no work to be found, so he got a job building the high school I attended which celebrated it's centennial in 2006. But for him the work was too messy and ‘hard,’ so he borrowed some money and opened his own barber shop in downtown Jersey City (sort of a Little Italy). When my dad was in the 4th

grade his father pulled him out of school and told the teacher he’d had enough "education" and dad had to go to work in the barbershop standing on a box lathering faces for shaves and shining shoes too. In those days it was not mandatory for children to stay in school 'til they were 16. (That was evident in the PBS program where kids were working in factories). This is why my father didn't think it was necessary for me to go to college because graduating from high school was the equivalent of graduating from Harvard Law.

“My grandmother died very young (her early 40's) in 1926, so my grandfather went to Holy Name cemetery in Jersey City to buy a gravesite. Now here's the rub: the cemetery's Board of Trustees was comprised wholly and solely of Irish Jesuit priests and so they refused to let him and his ‘ilk’ be buried there. Italians were simply not allowed in ‘their’ cemetery. But, as uneducated as Giuseppe was, he was smart enough not to be intimidated by them. So he went to an old family lawyer (Joe Lori) and won his case. The ‘Board’ was furious, but the worst part of it was that Giuseppe bought a plot for SIXTEEN - oh no! 16 Italians in just one gravesite!

“Your cousin Fina, my step-mom, was the last of the 16 to be buried there. If you walk through that cemetery you will find a vast number of Callaghans, Kellys, O'Briens, Gallaghers in the early years; but then, starting in the 1930's, you will see names like Buttigheri, Martini, Russo, Vicari and Bartolomeo. In those days, plots were bought to accommodate the whole family because everyone lived near each other up the block, down the block, across the street and around the corner. So when they died, they could all be ‘together’ again.

“As a footnote: My high school's teaching staff were ALL Irish, so my Italian teacher had a very, very hard time of it. They made her life miserable. Discrimination is a pretty ugly thing, but I'm proud to say that we Italians picked up our ‘big boy pants’ and got on with our lives and succeeded.

“Sorry for this lengthy e.m. BTW, what a wonderful picture of Zio Luigi! He was quite the gad-about. eh? I love, love, love "An Immigrant Ballad!" I am forwarding it on to my kids and my Italian friends. Beautiful. Later, Dude. Ann - and thanks.”

I replied, Dear Ann,

I have no idea what you think you have to apologize for. I just read your email to Jean and asked her what she thinks of the writing. She replied that she thinks it’s “wonderful.”

So do I, Ann! I’ve told you before how good I think you are. You’re a natural, born writer. Sincerely! That’s the opinion of someone who has taught a lot of writing to a lot of people. Please, do me a huge favor: write down all these family stories and send them to me, one by one. I will edit them and gather in a book, which I will then have published. I know at least two publishers who would love to have a book of them.

I am adding this story to my blog right now. Love always, and admiration too,

Lew

Another of Ann Badach's stories appears in this book:

La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON, all rights reserved. May not be reprinted without the express permission of the author.